Google Photos begins rolling out new sharing features this week

Give and get the photos you care about

Google Photos is getting a lot smarter. At the I/O conference last month, the tech giant unveiled several new additions to its app, including suggested sharing and shared libraries. The features are meant to make Google Photos a more social experience by encouraging you to share photos with contacts that appear in them rather than keeping them only on the device that took them.

The new features are starting to rollout this week. With Suggested Sharing, Google uses facial recognition to identify people in a picture from your list of Google Contacts and will show you a carousel of images that you might want to share based on who appears in them, but also taking into account whether it’s someone you interact with often.

The mobile app will have a new “Sharing” tab in the bottom right corner, providing a centralized view of pictures and videos that have been shared with you, as well as the ones that you’ve sent out. The same Sharing section is found to the left-hand navigation column on the web.

Suggested Sharing can even pick out the best shots taken at a particular event, and if a suggested person doesn’t have the app, Photos can send an SMS notification instead. Of course, users have the last say on what gets shared as they’ll have the option to review them before sending.

Meanwhile, Shared Libraries is geared towards families and very close relationships. You can choose to share entire albums or just part of one with another person. For instance, parents could have Photos automatically share any pictures taken of their children. They will automatically sync on each of their devices with the option to save them to local storage.